Much of Brandywine Creek State Park was originally a portion of the du Pont family's Winterthur estate.

[3] In the mid-1800s, the du Ponts hired Italian masons to build stone walls around much of the property that is today part of the park.

He was much less interested in maintaining a working farm than his father and grandfather, and instead had an eye toward transforming the estate into a museum of American arts.

With plans in motion to transform the rural scenic estate into housing developments, local citizens convinced the state that it should preserve the land.

[2][6] The park was brought up to its present size in 1981, when an additional 500 acres (200 ha) were donated to the state by William Poole Bancroft's Woodlawn Trustees.